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January 24: James or Christie?

I don’t want to make a choice here. I only want to explore the differences.

P.D. James wrote from the perspective of a career in health care administration and UK bureaucracies, as well as Parliament. She was not as prolific as Christie in terms of books.

Agatha wrote from her experience in WWI as a nurse working in a pharmacy. Poisons proliferate in her stories.

PD brings us a wider range of people in English society, and more recently—1960s through 1990s. They are less stock and are more likely to be three dimensional. Especially her main detective, Adam Dalgliesh. He is a poet, brooding at times yet fair and egalitarian, resolute to find the murderer but compassionate. She tends to have a formula of three murders, sometimes four, occurring in each book.

Some of Agatha’s stories are 100 years old, and in their originals some racist material can be spotted. It seems that she fixed her sights on the gentry class in English, which was declining. So many of her stories have to do with people killing for inheritances they are waiting on in penury, leading me to think, “Why don’t these people just go get jobs and support themselves rather than waiting on Aunt Gertrude to die or get murdered conveniently?”

Baroness James took more of philosophical and social commentary stance, as her futuristic novel The Children of Men shows.

Both women had sad first marriages. Agatha’s husband cheated on her and left her. Phyllis James husband suffered from mental illness after World War II and died early.

I was happy to find the recent Dalgliesh series, although after Season 1 I have to pay for it. Well, they say there is a free trial, but I am very allergic to free trials of media.

I am sure Agatha’s descendants have enjoyed far more royalty money than P.D.’s.

All that says, as a writer I prefer James, but Agatha has a bigger range and following. It seems an oxymoron to say we are blessed with both of these talented tellers of tales about murder. Blessed, maybe not, but we definitely enjoy them.


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